98 days to baby- 28 weeks pregz

Just a quick post.

Lately I've been crocheting and eating pizza a lot with Aja. Here is a squid toy for baby to eventually slobber on.

It also occurs to me that I should take some photos of the baby clothes that I've been gifted and ones that I've amassed on my own these past few months as I just took a call from my mom describing baby dresses and headbands while at the store to see if I want them. I've been reading a lot of crafting blogs and I like how some of them make "top 10" lists of pretty much anything you can think of. Maybe I should make a top 10 of crafting blogs that I like. Well, where I am going with this is the awesome graphics these bloggers make showing off their crafts.

Yesterday on the way to the pool I fell and jammed up my knee. It is hurting more than a typical scrape. Here's what it looks like
I was more upset that I ripped a giant hole in my maternity pants that I wear pretty much everyday. This comes after leaning down to pick something up in them last week and completely busting open the elastic waist. Yeah- breaking an elastic waist does wonders for your ego. So John, of course seeing the upside, was like- well at least it's the pants that you already broke!! ughhh. Now I'll have to start breaking in the other pair of maternity pants (I say this while wearing the damaged jeans).

My mom keeps bugging me for a pregnant belly photo. I'll get on it soon- promise.

CountDOWN begins = 103 days till baby (27 weeks pregnant)

As I type, I have this odd form of heartburn where there is no actual acid refluxing up to my mouth, just a warm, burning sensation deep down in my throat that flares up. It's real pleasant.

I'm 27 weeks pregnant and I've been pretty awesome with getting more advanced with my crocheting. Here is an alien thing that I made the other day.


I also painted this onto a box that I got for toting craft supplies

It is becoming more difficult to get out of bed. This forces me to test the limits of my bladder every morning. Aria's kicking and shifting and boxing has become much more frequent and a hell of a lot stronger. It definitely seems as though she responds to John's voice almost immediately while ignoring my own petitions. If I'm away at a meeting for a few hours, I'll come home and as soon as he starts talking she is excitedly moving around. Of course, the increased movement could be a result of sugar reaching her amniotic fluid but that would mean I must be stuffing my mouth with like, starburst and cherry fruit snacks and sobe fruit punch everytime I leave the house which would be totally unlike me.

We've submerged ourselves entirely in the first-time parent thing by enrolling in a Lamaze class and going swimming almost everyday. Both of these have been fantastic for us as a pair. I'll speak for myself, but Lamaze has been a guided way of making us think about what is going on and how we will thrive as a couple during labor (and beyond). It feels really good to know that John wants to be as supportive as humanly possible (as usual) and educated along with me about pregnancy. I know this is going to extend into our parenthood and how awesome is that?

Swimming everyday has been significant too. Physically, swimming makes me feel revitalized in a way that I don't know I've ever experienced. After an hour in the pool, my body feels flexible and my skin is tingling from what I assume to be improved circulation. I never expected to feel so good after a "workout". Having this routine with John has been so much fun too. It's a "thing" that we "do". I love that our schedule allows for it and I get to see John wait in line with a bunch of 4-10 year olds for the rope swing. I also love watching him do aqua jogging for 5 minutes for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain.

Tonight I'm preoccupied with thinking about the next few months and how they will pan out as far as John's working/living situation. I feel slightly unsettled and want more answers than usual. At the last Lamaze class we talked about labor coping strategies and the role the partner will play. If John relocates between now and June, I suppose I'm feeling anxious about how my pre-labor will go without him by my side. I don't know that this will be the case but the thought isn't easy to tuck away. Hopefully we'll have some concrete answers this week and we can start projecting our 3 month plan.

By the way, the women's locker room at the Ballard pool is a crazy place with a LOT of nudity. Nudity and conversation, nudity with strange children around and nudity with communal showers and soap dispensers.

release

I'm going to use a very dumb analogy to describe what I think is about to happen.

A while back Tai downloaded Sims 2. We got rid of it a couple weeks later but that's beside the point. The point is that while I was playing it, there got to be certain times in the game where things slipped out of my control and next thing I knew I had a house with like 4 people walking around peeing their pants, starving to death, talking to an imaginary bunny, washing themselves in the sink and so on. Every time I tried to tell one of them to go take a shower, he'd go in, the shower was broken, he'd look through the 4th wall at me and complain, the other guy would come in to use the toilet, the toilet was broken. The dad got fired from his job because he hadn't bathed or slept, the kid would come in on the bus from school and pass out in the driveway, it just went on and on.

At some point, through whatever wizardry, I figured out how to turn the corner on that game. First the repairman came in and fixed the shower and the toilet. They were all still starving and hallucinating but at least the hygiene and bathroom meters started getting under control. I managed to get a family member to cook a damn meal without stopping in the middle to run and climb in bed. Little by little the general sense of everyone getting diverted away from A to focus on B, then diverted away from B to focus on C, then from C to D, then back to A (without anything ever getting resolved) started to dissipate and I was able to play the damn game.

My feeling is that many layers of tension are on the verge of being released and that Tai and I are soon going to have a dramatic increase in our ability to do what we actually want to be doing at any given point in time vs what we've been able to do for the last little while. This may be very much the opposite of what people say having a child is like -- that it increases the number of fires you have to put out at all points day and night -- and I'm not doubting that at all, I'm just saying that in the next couple of months I think we are going to be able to make a ton of stressful situations disappear and take a lot of weight off our backs.

As I write this I'm conscious of a very tight feeling in my chest which has probably been there for several days and for good reason, and it's not going to be gone tonight or by the time I wake up in the morning, but I'm really looking forward to feeling it decompress bit by bit as more and more of what I consider to be distractions are cleared away and replaced with continuity and, dare I say, accomplishment.

Day 160- 25 weeks pregnant

15 weeks to go. Wow!

I got some photos in the mail today. When I moved here I brought along a handful of used film containers that I intended to process. These bad boys are REALLY old. Here is a sampling:

Richie Daniels in a nutshell circa 2003

My friend Gabby- oddly enough I received the cutest gift in the mail from her today with the photos.

How many times I saw the commercial on TV for this, paired with my unhealthy childhood obsession with cats, and I STILL DIDN'T SEE IT.

And while I'm at it here are some others from various sources:Baby John

Semi Baby Tai


John HS

Day 159 - If you're going to San Francisco make sure to bring Frizz Ease for your hair

Well, we are both back safe and sound in Seattle from our fun-filled excursion to San Francisco Mon-Weds. Hopefully things work out future-wise so we can start filling in the blanks as far as what city we'll be living in, where our daughter will spend at least the first few years of her life and, as the subject reveals, what kind of hair products I will be needing to invest in. By the time I got back to Seattle, I was half expecting some little baby sparrows to peak their heads out of my hair with its new nest-like qualities.

San Francisco is really sunny. I mean, maybe I've been in denial about Seattle weather- yea it drizzles frequently, but when it's sunny it's pleasant and normal. I felt like I was staring into the sun most of the time while there. I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge (two times as I was typing that I typed "Gordon Gate") and on the return journey when I came out of a tunnel through a mountain, I thought I was going to have to pull over because I was just absolutely blinded by the sun. Maybe my eyes have just become accustomed to indirect overcast sunlight. I don't know. Anyway, the more I explored SF the more I liked it. John was busy kicking ass with a job interview so all of this exploration was done solo (with baby girl hanging out within, of course).

The night we arrived, after spending some time at Carlos's awesome apartment, we headed to the hotel in Mountain view. Frankly, Mountain View is like a typical higher class Long Island town which gave me the yuuuuhhhlll chills. If I had to name which town on LI, I'd say Manhasset. So for about 1/4 of the people who grudgingly read this blog- there is your visual. I was thinking to myself, Yikes, I'm not sure if this is the kind of place I'm looking to spend any significant amount of time and psyching myself out on the whole deal (privately- I didn't share this with John before his interview; call it consideration?) The next day I hopped on the train into SF (about an hour ride north) squinting the whole way (re previous paragraph), I was also not very excited about the flatness of the landscape or the spanish style one-level housing abundance. My critical analysis is about to take a positive turn now- once I got into SF my opinion about everything was much brighter. There is a lot of personality, natural beauty and charm there. I did find that my usually accurate mental GPS was not functioning at all, which was a huge bummer. I tell John all the time I like to get lost and then find my way which is difficult once you've become familiar with the territory and here I was with a whole new map and I was like barely able to orient north from south.

When John came back from his interview we walked quite a ways downtown and ate at some place that seemed like it might be mexican due to the font of their signage but in fact was more like a diner without the gaudy greek mirrors and soulvaki. On the walk back to Carlos's place I fell and scraped my knee and both of us were complaining like true athletes about the state of our feet from such a trek- mine were swollen and getting grinded up against my sneakers and John was essentially wearing water shoes- I can just hear his reaction to this when he reads "Tai, those shoes are PRAAADDAAAAHHHS!"

We spent the evening with Carlos, Jesse, Ajit and Carly watching Alice in Wonderland and Lost and the next morning I woke up day/nightdreaming about eating cocoa pebbles.

All in all, I really enjoyed SF. It is very different to move to a new city under the premise of a longer, more permanent stay. When I moved to Seattle I was committing to a year; after 6 months I realized I could happily spend the rest of my life here but enjoyed the flexibility. If we end up moving anywhere, it will be for a longer stretch of time for sure and that context is odd. Of course the case isn't shut. I'm still rooting for Seattle- I'd like to continue working for the Center and be surrounded by the familiar but I'm also up for a big change and carving out a new life somewhere with John and Aria. Yea, we've pretty much decided her name is Aria so shout it from the rooftops. We'll let you know if that changes, and I'll probably insert it nonchalantly at the end of another blog post to weed out our less than avid readership. See ya!

Oh also I did a very shitty job of taking photos in SF. The only thing I captured was this:

Why even bother, you ask? I thought it was cool because of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TmsT1qsPo